Development was easier in the days of classical CICS, where all the logic was managed by a single mainframe computer and 3270 clients were responsible for nothing except displaying output and responding to keystrokes.  But that’s no longer adequate when smart phones and PC’s are more powerful than the mainframes of old, and our task is to develop systems that can integrate large shared databases with local processing to provide the modern systems that we need.  This needs web services, but development of distributed systems with COBOL, Java, C#, and similar technology is difficult.

Since 2015 MANASYS Jazz has been able to develop CICS web services, but it remained difficult to develop client programs to work with them.  Build 16.1 (December 2020) was a major breakthrough, offering integrated development of COBOL CICS web services for the mainframe, and C# client interfaces that make client development as easy as discovering properties and methods with Intellisense.

Build 16.2 (January 2021) supported services returning several records.  We’d found that each request/response took a second or two, whether it was returning 1 or many records, but the interface could page forward and back instantly within the list of returned records.  Build 16.2 also offered easy addition of related-table data, and interfaces for VSAM as well as DB2 web services.  Build 16.3 (June 2021) takes a further step, adding services and interfaces for parent-child record collections, for example a Department record with the list of Employees who work there.

Our video "Bridging Two Worlds" has been updated to demonstrate these features. See how easy it is to create a web service and related client logic that will display and update one or many records at a time. See how MANASYS controls updating with CICS-style pseudo-locking, preventing invalid updates automatically. See how easily MANASYS handles data from many records at a time, resulting in clean and efficient service architecture.

To see what else MANASYS Jazz will do, visit the Jazz Software web site.